Probing our infrastructure - electrical substation
I had written before about attempts to probe our critical infrastructure:
Water -
here and
here
Rail -
here
Air -
here
Sea ports -
here
Bombmaking -
here
Now its our power grid - from the
Wall Street Journal:
Assault on California Power Station Raises Alarm on Potential for Terrorism
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.
Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.'s Metcalf transmission substation. It is an incident of which few Americans are aware. But one former federal regulator is calling it a terrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.
The attack was "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.
Those transformers are not an off-the-shelf item -- each one is pretty much built to spec. There may be a couple units in the pipeline to replace a sabotaged unit but not ten or twenty. If there was a coordinated attack, the grid would be down for months.
Posted by DaveH at February 5, 2014 11:04 AM